REAL YOGA
Swami Harinanda
www.real-yoga.com
Miracles Exist When You Know What Key To Turn To Unlock
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NEWSLETTER

Hello subscribername,

This is a follow up on the re-incarnation article. There are a couple of things I would like to clear up before you read this newsletter.

1. I am really honored to be able to offer free Yoga lessons, and at the same time am sorry that I must charge for my book, The Portal. This goes to paying my webmaster for creating and keeping up such a wonderful web site. I add here that this book is very important in understanding what Real Yoga is and what you truly must strive for. It also explains how you have bee duped in regard to so much in this spiritual world of Yoga.
    
2. Few people really know how to listen. If I was to make a statement in an article, like for instance "There is no such thing as a soul" and then go on to explain the reason why I said that, most of you would immediately set up an response of negativity towards my argument. Whenever anyone challenges long held beliefs we have, we fight it immediately. Well in my classes, I will be challenging your long held beliefs and making you question. Where they came from? Is there any real sense in it? Who taught me that? and so on... and finally to look for the real sense about this life and your study of Yoga. Yoga must make sense. So learning how to listen - without barriers being set up allows the mind to see the sense in things.

REINCARNATION

How did this theory of reincarnation begin? It is after all just a theory. It can't be proved can it?

Do you believe in it because it was taught to you by someone - or because it makes sense. Does it makes sense because you hate, even subconsciously, to think of yourself as ending with this one life? Is it man's way of fulfilling a desire for his own eternity?

Other questions arise from the teachings of reincarnation also. Under hypnosis people have retraced their past lives, or so they have been led to believe. How in fact are people able to find objects back in the 18th century, hidden behind a corner stone of a fireplace in a certain village of a certain country, and explain in detail what the object is? There are many such stories as this which abound.

In many of the scriptures throughout the world, reincarnation is propounded. Even though the Christians do not like to profess it, still, it was one of the disciples who, when asked by Jesus, "Who do ye say I am?" answered , "You are Elias returned."

Reincarnation was an accepted fact in the early biblical days.

Perhaps one can never know the truth behind reincarnation, yet one can think of it this way - when Ramana Maharshi said, "You cannot remember your own birth, and you will not remember your own death - you are always HERE."

This makes more sense, as we know while we are alive in this one body and mind we have an attributable consciousness. Our consciousness is filled with ideas, thoughts, concepts - all attributes which give us an allotment to this state of Impure consciousness. Yogis are always seeking Pure consciousness, that state without attributes. They want that state while still remaining in full awareness of it. This is possible while experiencing Satchitananda.

For all the rest, I am afraid due to the reality of our consciousness - there is nothing left but pure consciousness, so in fact it would be impossible for you to exist as an entity after you are dead.

That is not such a bad thing really is it? After all when you go to sleep at night in the deepest of sleeps, there is nothing there also. In order to KNOW as in awareness, these states of death and deep sleep, you must attain one of the stages of the higher samadhis.

When we die and drop off the body casing and the brain-mind-thought connection, we are once again in the state of Pure consciousness, but without awareness.

Just suppose there is no such thing as reincarnation, then where do all the past lives that people speak of come from? Perhaps there is a clue in the Hindu scriptures. Do you remember reading about the Akashic record? That is the book where every thought and every deed of every individual is recorded. Now rather than think of it as a book, what if there is a part of universal consciousness that retains as memory, everything that has happened. Would it not be possible for me or you, to tune into a part of that consciousness - a part that took place in the eighteenth century as an example, where a young girl hid an object in a corner stone of a fireplace. Could you not tune in to the very girl's state of consciousness itself, becoming that child - in a memory capture only?

The power of the mind you must remember is just being discovered by our scientists today, yet Yogis, who long before the concept of reincarnation, religions or myths began, knew of the ONENESS of mind, and by tuning in to the right station, or for that matter just willy nilly twirling the dial of their mind-receiver could pick up the most fantastic information found in universal consciousness such as the example in the previous paragraph of the girl in the 18th century. This is felt to be what people are doing when they believe that it is they who in fact were the young girl hiding the object behind the brick in the fireplace.

What happens when the mind unfolds in an untrained initiate? He opens into a world or worlds that he has never seen before, and the visions he beholds, whether beatific or demonic is very real to him and if, unlike the dream visions we have, sometimes cross over into our waking world, so that the hallucination is now seen to be in our room, or on a hill, or in the sky, we then link an hallucination with our objective reality and believe it to be equally true - even after it has vanished from our view.

The entire Universal Mind is filled with worlds unheard of and unthought of by man. Some of them have been thought of and experienced. The Astral plane for instance is a plane which resides within the mind of man, yet when experienced seems to be as real as is the waking world; thus was born the Hades and the Hellfire of the Catholics. On that plane resides the bat eared, the whip tailed little monsters and all sort of sulphurous worlds.

Dante himself opened up to that Astral world in his great epic poem "The Inferno". A Yogi knows that these worlds are not real and are mere hallucinations which must be passed through - and, there are more, the Planet of Sri Yuketswar's Hirinyaloka and also more refined etheric planes that the great Babaji lives in, where one must be so still that in order to see him, not a breath of mental disturbance is allowed. BUT all of these worlds are inside your mind - not somewhere else.

They are all no different in essence than your dream state, a mere mental formation which appears to be real until you wake up to a higher state of consciousness - this so called awake world.

The great siddhi powers which one may attain unconsciously, trap people badly enough into believing that what they see is true. Also for the developed Yogi who attains siddhi powers, which can actually be put to work in this waking world, yet must be relinquished, are all a trap. They are the last traps set by the greatest illusionist of them all, Maya. All this relinquishing, renouncing or giving up must be accomplished before you can enter the fourth state of consciousness, Truriya.

So where does that leave reincarnation? I think where it belongs. To those who wish to believe in it, and to those who have some experiences which make it all appear real to them. You only throw off the dross state of body and impure consciousness, and when time is ripe you may take on another form, but whether you can remember what your past form was, when you can't even remember your own birth or death time seems to me of no importance. And if you do remember one form or other, was it an illusion, or was it a memory pattern from the Akashic record, or was it just some hopeful desire to know that you had existed in the past, therefore you will exist in the future?

To the Yogi, what is important is right NOW. To waste one's time looking into the past, or dreaming about the future is a waste of this moment and this is the only moment we have. Make good use of it. To the Yogi, the best use of that NOW time is to unite with the ATMAN. The rest of your life will take care of itself.

Just as a man can only work so hard and then must rest - or he feels the need for diversion, so too does the Yogi. In the beginning the time of work spent is just a few short minutes a day, but as the awareness of SELF unfolds more and more time is given over to it, until that fourth state of consciousness is attained, where one resides at all times at one with the Paramatman (Satchitananda) in the fourth state of consciousness, Truriya.

Namaste,

Swami Harinanda

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